Podcast Strategy: Engage Your Audience. Build Trust. Be Relevant.
Wednesday, August 13th, 2008You’ve probably heard of podcasting, but do you know why it’s important? This powerful communication tool is being adopted faster than any other broadcast media in history. Having a good podcast strategy can ensure you’re keeping current and leveraging the most effective media tools to build deeper relationships with your target audience.
Engage Your Audience
Having greater reach and more direct touch points with your audience is something every communication strategy aims to achieve. Podcasts provide a direct communications link to an global audience with next to no incremental cost. Taking a small amount of time to develop a podcast strategy can result in a new communications channel that engages a world-wide audience.
A podcast strategy can also leverage all the social tools on the Internet to encourage interaction and engage your audience on a deeper level. Users can do more than tune-in to a podcast. They can follow links, give feedback, pause or rewind, share content, or engage in many other ways. With a good podcast strategy, you can monitor your user engagement and respond to it quickly.
Build Trust
You already know that trust is essential for effective communications. Like Radio and TV, podcasts are publicly broadcasted rich media and carry more credibility than press releases, lectures, emails, or most other common communication tools. Podcasts put the persuasive power associated with a global broadcast at your disposal.
A podcast is delivered to users whenever they’re ready and choose to play it. A person who receives information through a podcast is more empowered than a person who receives the same information in a presentation, flier, or by other traditional means. Podcasts give your audience more control over their experience, which helps build greater trust between you and your users.
Be Relevant
Web 2.0 is a reality. If you’re not familiar with terms like “social media”, “blog”, or “podcast”, you’re quickly losing touch with the standard tools people are using to communicate. With hundreds of thousands of podcasters, and over 18 million regular podcast users in the USA, podcasting is becoming an important part of the Web 2.0 world.
Podcasting also presents relevant content to your audience. People who listen to or watch podcasts do so because they want to. With a solid podcast strategy, you can deliver messages that are in-line with your goals, and draw in an audience that already sees a benefit in what you are saying.
If you think podcasting is only relevant for teenagers and Silicon Valley tech start-ups, think again. Libraries, hospitals, local retailers, fortune 500 companies, universities, professors, police departments, fitness trainers, authors, or just about any organization with a need to communicate in the modern world can use podcasting, and in a great many cases already are. Podcast strategies can be powerful, competitive, and a lot easier to implement than you might have ever imagined.
Feel free to send me an email if you have questions about how you could implement a podcast strategy. My email is rian [at] dailysplice.com.
If there was one language I wanted to learn it would be Japanese. If there was another, it would be Spanish. =) Since Praxis Language doesn’t do a Japanese podcast (yet) Spanish would be the podcast I’d acutally end up studying if I had the time. Why? Because Praxis Language provides the best language learning tools in the world, bar none. I’d much rather take my second choice for prefered language than settle for anything other than Praxis Language as my prefered learning tool. Fortunatly, for a lot of you, Spanish is probably the preferred language of study too… so for you this is a slam dunk! Give this a try, you will be impressed. Not only by the podcasts, but by the online learning tools and the probably to an even greater extent, the massive online community they’ve got going. We’ve got an interview coming up with one of the stars from Praxis, but in the mean time, give this podcast a listen!
Hello. The One Minute Tip is a fun podcast I’ve been listening to a lot these days. They do all sorts of neat little tips, and they are not always (or even frequently) conventional tips. You might, for example, get a hint on how to charge your iPhone on the fly when you’re expecting an important call… and it may involve going into a department store and nonchalantly making use of display gadgets. Anyway, check it out. It’s short and regular which is what I like best.
